Posts Tagged ‘amplification’

Every company wants to its employees to be its best ambassadors but few succeed. You do not know how many companies ask me how they turn their employees into advocates. But what they do not realize is the WIIIFM factor it requires to get employees to share.

The whole concept of Employee Advocacy is good, but it being implemented with the wrong approach. Companies are looking at quick fixes with a LinkedIn, Twitter or even social media training or implementing a piece of software to easily share content but this does not get employees to move.

Why? Because it is not about:

Forcing your employees to share content on their personal channels

Asking them to share (un)authentic content (because sharer wants to be authentic!)

Only share company branded content

Gamifying the sharing process

In one word: WIIIFM (from the sharer’s point of view) is completely missing

Employee advocacy will only happen if you invest in your employees both offline and online. If the culture is not right, people with not share (in the real world as well as in the new world).

Where should your focus go to?

Have your employees create content (“what I create I share!” increase WIIIFM) – I dare you to let go!

Create corporate content that makes your employees look good when they share – it is not about you but about them!

Share employee content of corporate accounts to show you cherish them – Give and Receive!

Give them the freedom to create content but provide guidance and training to up the quality – Trust!

Another key component is your management buy-in, support and of course, lead-by-example. If your management is absent or not sharing why should your employees?

Over the course of the next weeks, I will be sharing more tips on how you can setup your employee advocacy programs. In the meantime, I love to hear your biggest hurdles with employee advocacy.

Whether you like it or not sharing content on your LinkedIn company profile will help your company’s visibility and allow its employees to share valuable company approved content via their personal profile. However, most companies and people have no idea what to share. Therefore I have brought together these 50 posts from 33 companies and organisations as a source of inspiration on what to share on LinkedIn. When you take a look at this list, I am convinced you will not be able to say that you have no content to share anymore.

LinkedIn company pages are essential for branding and for building and sustaining a following and community. LinkedIn is providing B2B companies with a unique opportunity to present themselves as thought leaders and generate meaningful conversation about their businesses. Sharing the above content will increase readership, create visibility and encourage employees to share the content in their professional network.

So what are you waiting for to post every day on your LinkedIn company profile?

One of trends for 2013 will be “Amplification”. The times that companies and people rely on asking others to redistribute their posts and messages is over. Just like with email, you as a fan are getting too many messages and notifications (many of you are turning them off) and thus ignoring these requests.

As more and more of the employees are becoming active on social media, companies are realizing that they are low hanging fruit when it comes to brand ambassadorship. They want to enlist them as ambassadors and are setting up awareness sessions in the hope these employees will actually help spread the word. .

Companies are also looking for new ways to get their messages promoted. Help is on the way in form of Social Media Amplification Applications. The concept is simple: Leverage employees, partners, customers and fans to share your company’s social media messages on your behalf. The objective is to drive traffic to websites, campaign or blogs to generate leads.

How does it work?

Step 1: Findamplicationapplication

There are a number of these applications available today. I predict that there will be more coming in 2013. GaggleAMP, SocialSeeder, Spread.US and Socialtoaster are in the forefront today. For more details, see below.

Step 2: Recruit fans

You will invite and recruit fans, influencers and employees to join your distribution community. You might have to implement some form of gamification (2nd trends for 2013) in order for them to join your circle of amplifiers.

Step 3: Create Messages

Create the content you want to get distributed through the community. And make it easy for your amplifiers to distribute it in their social networks

Step 4: Amplication Process

The amplification application will inform by email (or other forms) your community there are messages ready for distribution. The amplifiers then can select which messages they distribute in which social network.

Step 5: Monitor & analyze

As with any campaign, you need to monitor the process, analyze the results and fine-tune your next steps. Continue to engage your community of amplifiers.

Who are some players?

GaggleAMP, US based company, is the social marketing platform that lets companies amplify their social media reach by leveraging individual employees, customers and partners. (source GaggleAMP)

Users can share these messages on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn automatically, by e-mail notification or from the website thus giving the user full control of what is getting shared where. The gamification option makes this tool more engaging.

In addition to the message amplification, GaggleAMP provides a myriad of unique analytics about how the messages perform in the various social media networks including message reach, clicks, comments, Likes, shares, re-tweets and more.

Pricing starts at $25/month for 50 messages shared. There is a 7 day free trail period.

SocialSeeder, a Belgian company, unlocks the power of your true influencers.

As a company tapping into the potential of social media your holy grail is to find and identify super influencers to quickly spread news and create a buzz on new products & services.

SocialSeeder facilitates employees, clients, fans, partners & other influencers to seed the messages you want to bring across via social media and allows to measure the impact in full detail through a personalised dashboard. (Source – SocialSeeder).

SocialSeeder, is focusing on Social Media Campaigns. You start by creating your list of amplifiers (Influencers & Ambassadors). You follow this up with the creation of campaign which will result in an email being created where you ask the amplifiers to distribute via the networks of their choice (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ or even email). The user has full control of which message gets distributed where.

A comprehensive number of statistics are available to both track each amplifier and message amplification by platform and hits.

SocialToaster, a US based company, allows an organization to recruit supporters to help automatically create word-of-mouth referrals and traffic through Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. (Source – Socialtoaster).

SocialToaster amplifies corporate messaging on brands’ social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn), proving that there is immense value in social media engagement. Loyal fans of a brand called ‘Super Fans’ are mobilized with an email whenever the brand has blog postings, events, articles, or promotions for them to promote. With just one click, Super Fans share the brand’s content with peers across all of their selected social networking sites. The visibility of the message increases exponentially as the content is shared. (Source Socialtoaster)

Socialtoaster allows you to run in the cloud and on your own servers. Other interesting features are gamification and viral recruitment formulas.

Spread.us,, US based company, is a twitter-only tool that allows you to promote campaigns and blog posts. It enables website readers to automatically share and distribute newly published content from their favorite content or blog on Twitter. (source: Spread.us).

First you enlist the support of your supporters by inviting them. You then create the perfect tweet which will get distributed automatically via their accounts. Then you track the performance of the post through a number of statistics. The biggest drawback of this tool is the lack of control on the user’s side. Opting out is the list only option for the end user to stop tweets being posted through his/her account.

Pricing starts at $0 for up to 5 subscribers. Between 6 to 25 subscribers (fans) you will pay $4/month with variable pricing if fans increase or decrease.

This is the time when everyone creates a list of things that were or things that will be. Normally, I do not participate in this ritual but this year I can’t stop myself. The reason being that the lists I am seeing are so out there in terms of predictions that I want to bring back to pragmatism to 2013. I see 5 major trends for 2013 and here they are!

Participation – Now that Facebook has reached over 1 billion members, it is fair to assume that in Belgium we will round the cape of 5 million in 2013. With LinkedIn having 187 million users, we will pass the 1.5 million users in Belgium in 2013. However, I am predicting a boom of twitter usage in Belgium with thanks to the traditional media. Inspirational is the radio with programs such as #hautekiet or #touché, TV with the hashtag #7dag or #SODD, and traditional magazines such as Flair, Humo and many more. Slowly they are driving consumers to Twitter and thus comes the explosion of number of users. I think we could be looking at 2.5 million accounts with 1 million active users by the end of the year.

Amplification – Many companies are setting up company accounts on social media but they are struggling to get the following they would like to have. However, they are forgetting the “untapped potential” they are sitting on. A fair amount of their employees is active on social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) during and after working hours (survey Vanguard Leadership October 2012). Unfortunately, they rarely follow, like or support their company on social media. And these would be the best ambassadors for your company. Remember the old days when they were motivated to recommend their company to their friends in the real world…

Companies are taking notice and we are seeing that large companies are running “awareness sessions”for their employees with a number of goals in mind: provide information about the general use of social media, explain the social media policy but mostly to ask employees to become social media ambassadors for their companies. This leads to another trends for 2013, the introduction of social media “amplification software”. These software packages will allow companies to post messages on the corporate accounts, inform their employees, ambassadors and influencers about these messages and have them re-distributed by their employees, ambassadors and influencers. Tap into the “untapped potential“.

Gamification = Even though this word has been on the lips of many, I think 2013 is the year when it will become real. The gaming techniques will find their way in which we use social media, learn, or do business. Today the emphasis lies on badges, mayorships, free goods, etc. but the evolution is going to be quick and innovative. A true revolution in the making.

So the biggest challenge for companies in 2013 is how their are going to use awareness building to inspire their employees’ participation to social media to become ambassadors and amplify the corporate messages using a number of gamification schemes.